1. Fireplace For Your Home (Classic Edition)
This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an hour long video of logs burning in a fireplace so that you can pretend you have a fireplace of your own (or a second fireplace, because why not?).
It’s in 4k, so if you’ve recently bought a new TV and are struggling to find things in extremely high quality to watch, you might as well look at some logs burning.
2. Fireplace For Your Home (Birchwood Edition)
The same storyline as the Classic Edition, only this time with Birchwood. It’s actually even nicer to watch. If you have a TV in your bedroom, stick one of these videos on and you’ll doze off within a couple of minutes.
It also plays a weird psychological trick on you by making the room feel warming, even though it’s the same temperature as before you started watching videos of logs burning on Netflix.
3. Slow TV: Train Ride Bergen to Oslo
For anyone who has never been to Norway, here’s a chance to witness seven hours worth of scenery from a train driver’s point of view.
Seven hours sounds like a ridiculous commitment, but if you stick this on for an hour a night and fast forward through all the bits in tunnels, then it’s very achievable. It’s lovely to go asleep to, but there’s a weird ‘bong’ noise every time the train pulls up to a tunnel which kind of spoils it. Thankfully, you can just lower the volume.
This one lets you see so many different landscapes – huge forests on mountains, sunny lakes, snowy lakes and Norwegian neighborhoods.
4. Slow TV: Northern Passage
Apparently, Norwegians are mad for making ridiculously long documentaries. This one hour film is a condensed version of a documentary that is six (6!!) days long. There’s a gentle American man narrating this one, but you get to see some nice Norwegian scenery.
Have the Norwegian tourist board secretly planted all of these extremely relaxing videos on Irish Netflix in an attempt to make us visit?
Ireland should make our own version to show the rest of the world — an hour long video of a man from Kerry in his 70s shouting downstairs to his wife that he can’t find his good cap, only to realise she was actually in a neighbour’s house all along and didn’t hear him. Or maybe a 30 minute video of the Luas from The Point to The Square in Tallaght.
Imagine the relaxing ‘ding ding ding’ every time a pedestrian stepped out in front of it by accident.
5. Slow TV: Northern Railway
Yep, you guessed it. Another Norwegian train documentary. This one is only an hour long (it’s condensed and edited from 10 hours of footage) if you don’t have seven hours to spare. Like all of the other Norwegian films, it shows off some unreal scenery.
There’s some narration over this train journey across the Arctic Circle and some interviews with the passengers.
Netflix also released a hilarious behind the scenes look at how the wood for the fireplace videos was selected.
